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CONTENTS.

THE RAMBLER.

VOL. X. New Series.

JULY 1858.

PART LV.

THE DEAD-LOCK IN POLITICS.

Ir every body who talked cant was to be set down as a rogue, what a scoundrelly world would this be in which we are living! Many people, indeed, imagine that the talking of cant necessarily implies hypocrisy. And no doubt this is true in many cases. Cant is the natural language of hypocrisy; and as there are plenty of hypocrites in the world, there are plenty of people whose canting phrases are the genuine outward signs of the hollowness which possesses them within.

But it is on a superficial view of human life that critical persons decide that cant and sincerity are incompatible things. Paradoxical as it may seem, we believe that in many instances cant is the natural production of sincerity and earnestness of a very genuine kind. It is not the result of sincerity and earnestness of the highest order, nor of that which is accompanied with the best intellectual gifts. But unite a small, or even an average and respectable, degree of intellect with that amount of confidence in truth, simply as truth, which belongs to the usual run of really sincere men, and the production of a very considerable amount of cant is the almost inevitable result.

The seeming paradox thus stated will disappear when we ask ourselves what we mean by this common word 66 cant." As the word is generally employed, it describes, we take it, a conventional style of phraseology, not strictly expressing the real sentiments of those who use it, but adopted for the -purpose of making some sort of impression upon others. It is the language we use when we fancy that the mere naked presentation of Sur actual opinions will not work the result which we desire to produce. Human life abounds with circumstances which call this system into play. Every body is

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at times so placed as to wish to impress something or other upon somebody else. Either he wants to appear to be what he knows he is not; or he thinks such and such sentiments are the right thing; or he considers that it will pay well in money or reputation to adopt them; or he holds them to be the correct representation of his official position; or he fancies that unless he overstates and exaggerates what he means, his. auditors will go away unaffected, and not believe one half of what he does mean. From these and many other causes it results that society, both private and public, echoes with sounding sentences which men pick up from their neighbours, or invent for themselves, and go on repeating and repeating till those who ask for simple truth of statement are bewildered and out of their wits with the windy din.

It would, indeed, be a curious speculation to trace the rise and progress of some of the most popular errors, through the influence of this more honest sort of cant. It would be instructive to a high degree to look back historically, and see how these various delusions, whether religious, political, artistic, or social, grew up under the fostering care of men whose aim was in the main honest and benevolent, but whose confidence in truth was not sufficient to make them shy of overstatements, or who did not possess sufficient originality to save them from borrowing and exaggerating other men's language. Cant is, in fact, in its essence very much of the nature of borrowed or stolen goods, and has to be refurbished up in order to pass for the bond-fide possession of its present owner. Words which are forcible enough on the lips of the man who first uses them, as the correct expression of his own mind, sound somewhat flat when repeated secondhand. cordingly the borrower touches them up, and colours them. here and there with a fresh epithet, or a slight variation in phrase, or by the addition of a superlative or two. And so the work goes on; and the longer the original notion lasts, and the more widely it spreads, the more extensive is the process of change it is fated to undergo.

The positions most favourable to the production of cant are, unfortunately, those in which it is of the utmost importance to avoid it. It is just when we are called upon to make impressions upon others that we are most tempted to pile adjective upon adjective, through a fear lest our good intentions should fail of their effect. This is one of the commonest causes why those who teach the young are so bitterly disappointed in the fruits of their teaching. Nervously anxious about their charge, they little know how soon their exaggerated statements cease to work their first effect, and